Gertrude Simmons was the daughter of a YanktonSioux mother and a Euro-American father. She adopted the name Zitkala-Sa in her teens. When she was eight, she was sent to White’s Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary school in Wabash, Indiana. At age 19, against her family’s wishes, she enrolled at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, also a Quaker school, and graduated in 1897. For two years she taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but she was uncomfortable with the school’s harsh discipline and its curriculum, which was devised to teach Euro-American ways and history, thus eradicating students’ Native American cultural identities.

While at Carlisle, she published several short stories and autobiographical essays in The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly under her name Zitkala-Sa. The pieces’ themes derived from her struggle to retain her cultural identity amid pressure to adapt to the dominant American culture. In 1901 she published Old Indian Legends, an anthology of retold Dakota stories.

Title page of Old Indian Legends (1901), a collection of traditional Sioux …

She married Raymond Talesfase Bonnin (who was half Euro-American and half Sioux) in 1902, and they moved to a reservation in Utah. She became a correspondent for the Society of the American Indians, the first reform organization to be administered entirely by Native Americans.

In 1913 she collaborated with the composer William F. Hanson, writing the libretto for the operaThe Sun Dance, the first opera by a Native American. It premiered that same year in Vernal, Utah, and was staged periodically by rural troupes before being performed in 1938 by the New York Light Opera Guild.

In 1916 she became the secretary of the Society of the American Indian, and she and her husband moved to Washington, D.C., where she served as a liaison between the society and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She also edited the society’s American Indian Magazine (1918–19). Under the name Gertrude Bonnin, she coauthored (with Charles H. Fabens and Matthew K. Sniffen) the book Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians, an Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery (1924), which exposed the mistreatment of Native Americans in Oklahoma.

She founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, and, as the organization’s president, she advocated citizenship rights, better educational opportunities, improved health care, and cultural recognition and preservation. Her investigation of land swindles perpetrated against Native Americans resulted in her appointment as an adviser to the U.S. government’s Meriam Commission of 1928, the findings of which eventually led to several important reforms. She remained active as a spokesperson for Native American concerns until her death.

a broad alliance of North American Indian peoples who spoke three related languages within the Siouan language family. The name Sioux is an abbreviation of Nadouessioux (“Adders”; i.e., enemies), a name originally applied to them by the Ojibwa. The Santee, also known as the Eastern...

member of a Christian group (the Society of Friends, or Friends church) that stresses the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that rejects outward rites and an ordained ministry, and that has a long tradition of actively working for peace and opposing war. George Fox, founder of the society in England,...